The Family-Without-Electricity Club Forms and Disbands in the Same Day

I don't wanna get up. Maybe she won't call, like last time.

I went to bed a few minutes before 3:30 this morning. I have to be in front of the computer by 8 for a phone interview with actress/singer Andrea Marcovicci, who played Russian Olympian Alicia Rogov in The Concorde: Airport '79. It's 7:45. Her assistant originally set up the interview for this past Monday morning at 9. Ms. Marcovicci didn't call, and her assistant apologized by e-mail later.

I actually wouldn't mind if she didn't call this time either because I want to get back to sleep. But I have to do this because her assistant offered no other time in the forseeable future, citing a tight schedule. I learn later that that's not Hollywoodspeak. It's actually a tight schedule.

I should have gone to bed earlier. I wish I didn't feel like I'm trying to pull my face from a puddle of glue. But last week, Southern California Edison sent a notice that the power would be shut off from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., to ease the load on the system and to hopefully prevent rolling blackouts during the summer. Or something like that. An electric company's reasoning is like trying to figure out the true motivation behind Scientology.

Therefore, the 9 a.m. time I requested for this interview, which was rejected, would not have worked anyway. Mom suggested last night that I print out my questions and have a notepad handy just in case the power cuts out during the interview. I took that precaution, but hope I won't need it because I can type interview answers much faster than writing them.

I finally get out of bed. Bathroom. Teeth. I'm still a little tired, but I know I'll feel the effect of a little over four hours' sleep later. I wanted Cheerios soaked in Silk Very Vanilla soymilk as usual, but it's 7:56. No time. Just a banana. At least it's hefty in the stomach.

I sit down at the computer, with printed questions, notepad and pen in front of me. I stick my flash drive into a port at the bottom of the computer, open my "Questions for Andrea Marcovicci" Word file, and make sure I have all the questions I want to ask her, especially about filming in the Concorde set on stage 12 at Universal.

The phone rings. It's 8:06.

"Rory?"

"Yes, that's me."

"It's Andrea Marcovicci."

"Yes; I know that very well." (I don't tell her that her name appeared on the Caller ID at the computer, but I know the voice well enough to be able to recognize it without a Caller ID, before she said her name.)

Regretting McCambridge

When Ms. Marcovicci didn't call that Monday morning, I was worried that I was going to interview someone who was full of herself, only giving time to me because she ought to throw some peanuts sometimes. Her assistant gave me the impression that that's who I might be talking to, because she was firm in her approach, and I worried that requesting another time, if I had to, would make me persona non grata. You form your impressions, right or wrong, from the experience you have at the start.

I was totally wrong.

Ms. Marcovicci begins the conversation with an apology for not calling on Monday morning, telling me that she was involved with something else, and said I probably wouldn't want to know about why she hadn't called. Yeah, I would like to know. After all, I don't interview singers every day. But I don't press. I don't think it would be polite.

For 20 minutes, Ms. Marcovicci is as I imagine her singing must be. She's playful, laughing many times throughout while remembering what she deems "the worst Airport movie." She had hoped The Concorde: Airport '79 would make her a more well-known actress, just like director David Lowell Rich hoped that this would lead to more features for him. Neither happened.

Her biggest regret of '79 is not paying attention to Mercedes McCambridge, who played Nelli, Alicia's minder. She says she was a "young pup," "and kind of scatterbrained at the time and not as appreciative of her as I should have been." She understands now that that's why McCambridge was "relatively impatient with me and harsh to me."

Then, Ms. Marcovicci gives me the information I was jonesing for, about the Concorde set itself, and what the crew did to help simulate the plane being upside down and depressurized. I'm saving all that for the book, but it represents fully what I'm looking to do with this book. Ms. Marcovicci also expresses great pleasure at my idea, saying that fans of these movies would certainly want to know all about them, as well as disaster movie fans and others. Genuine delight.

At the end of the interview, she has time for only one or two more questions. I skip the one asking about her on the set at the end of the movie after the Concorde lands under snow in the mountains because in describing the scene to her before, despite appearing onscreen, she says she doesn't remember it. She trusts me, a fan, though. I ask her about working with indie director Henry Jaglom on two films, admiring his tenaciousness in filmmaking, and I ask about her experience working with the late Martin Ritt on The Front, Ritt being one of my favorite directors. Great admiration for him.

Earlier in the interview, she reveals something stunning to me in passing while talking about the filming: She's great friends with Susan Blakely, who played Maggie Whelan. My final question to her is a request for her to pass along my contact information to Blakely, since I couldn't find any contact information on her online, nor an agent's contact information, and an e-mail to her husband's PR firm bounced back with "unauthorized mail is prohibited." I was going to call the firm directly, but available interviews come first, and I've got a few more to do at the moment.

Ms. Marcovicci tells me she'll let Ms. Blakely know about me and my project right away. How she does it, I don't know, but I trust she will. She warns me that once Blakely gets on the phone, she doesn't stop talking. It suits me. Blakely was on the Concorde set and filmed scenes in Paris and Washington, D.C., so she could be one of the greatest resources I'll have about the making of '79, besides Peter Rich, the son of the late David Lowell Rich. Plus, on the Concorde after the final depressurization from the device that opened the cargo door in flight, she was involved in one of the main special effects, in a section of the floor bursting below her, creating a hole through which shots of the snow-covered mountain can be seen. I want to know how they did that and what they told her it would involve. I hope she contacts me. With the backing of Ms. Marcovicci, how could she not? I've no doubt she'll play up the uniqueness of this project to Ms. Blakely.

That was the end of the interview, and after saying goodbye and hanging up, I look up Ms. Marcovicci's tour schedule, finding that she's performing on March 14 and 15 in West Hollywood, and for two dates in April at the brand-new Smith Center in Las Vegas. I immediately e-mail her assistant, mentioning that my family and I are planning to move to Henderson, expressing my disappointment that I probably won't be able to go to either show, and asking her to convey my sincerest hope to Ms. Marcovicci that she'll return to the Smith Center in the years to come. Also in April, I'm missing a Gershwin concert performed by the Las Vegas Philharmonic at Smith Center, so I'm hoping that the Philharmonic will have another concert of that next season.

One Book Out, Another Book In

A few minutes after 9:30, the power goes out. Expected, but it means that we can't open the fridge. Therefore, warm water bottles and lunch will have to come from whatever's in the cabinets and on the counter near the stove. I still need to eat more for breakfast, but since I don't want to open the fridge to get the Silk milk, I settle for another banana and a Quaker oatmeal raisin granola bar. It's lucky I made Mom some tea before the power went out, because our hot water dispenser in the kitchen runs on electricity.

Suppose I had a Kindle that needed to be charged and I forgot to do it the night before, remembering to do it today, but the power being out, I can't for all of the morning and most of the afternoon. This is one reason I will never get one, but also because I love real books. And it's better just to open one up instead of waiting for a Kindle to turn on (which I imagine doesn't take long), and then going through the menu, finding what I want to read, and there's the book, but flat on that screen. Too impersonal for me.

Yesterday, I received a book in the mail called How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom, positing that pleasure goes much deeper than simply having favorite foods and favorite music and favorite activities, and setting out to explain it. I had been thinking of other books in my room that I wanted to read, but with a title like that, and my love of pleasure, I opened it right away. But

Today, I read it more slowly than I usually read, which is a sign that it wasn't as interesting to me as I had hoped. Bloom presents many timely examples and shows that he's hip to pop culture without sounding like he's overreaching, but the apparent science he explains began to bore me. I make it to page 93 and put it in the Goodwill box. With how many books I have in my room, and how much I want to read throughout my life, I can't waste time on a book that isn't working for me. I don't have a set number of pages I adhere to before I give up on a book, but I try to give more of a chance to a book that has a topic that interests me, such as this one.

I go back to my room to look for my next book, remembering the Charles Kuralt books I want to read, including his memoir, A Life on the Road. But then, On Gratitude shoves the Kuralt books out of my thoughts. It's interviews Todd Aaron Jensen conducted with celebrities about what they're grateful for in life, what gratitude means to them, and it delves into parts of their careers and what they love in their lives. The list includes Jeff Bridges, Ray Bradbury, Elmore Leonard, Morgan Freeman, Hugh Laurie, Ben Kingsley, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some interviews were conducted by phone, others in person, and you can easily tell which were which. It's also my kind of book because it delves into pleasure in different ways, and I open it up, and judging by the speed at which I'm reading, I know I'm devouring it gleefully. It works for me.

While reading, I find such peacefulness without the humming of electricity, the refrigerator keeping cool, the TV on, and I know the refrigerator's functions are necessary, but I really like this for today. Meridith pulls out the radio that Mom has on when she takes a shower and tunes it to KUSC 91.5, Los Angeles' classical music station. I can listen to classical music like this, and did when I was a kid. But put me in an auditorium with an orchestra performing pieces from various composers, and I am deathly bored. I can't sit there and listen to it like that. I would make an exception for Gershwin, but I generally can't do it for other composers. Maybe I should, though, just to see if anything's changed since I attended a classical music concert as extra credit for a music class at the Pembroke Pines campus of Broward Community College. I could imagine it in my mind as my own Fantasia, thinking up my own images. It might help. I want to support the Las Vegas Philharmonic after I become a resident, and actually, if they have a Schubert concert, I would go to that. The sitcom Wings uses a piece of his in the opening credits, and that's how I first heard of him and wanted to hear more of his music, because I love that fluttering piano sound.

This works so wonderfully: A book and classical music on the radio. No TV. No Internet. I can't keep myself from spending hours on the computer, since I'm working on my book, but I want to scale back the hours and do things like this. I am, in some respect, reading a lot more in past months. But more, more, more. I do have a radio in my room, and I'm sure I can get 91.5 on there. Mom can't get any radio stations in her room; such is the injustice of hillsides and mountains. She's excited about moving to Henderson for many reasons, the greatest being moving out of Santa Clarita, but the second reason would be that she can have radio stations again. Complete flatlands in Las Vegas and Henderson. None of the seven or eight different climate zones that Southern California is known for, separated by mountains. And no radio signals getting cut off because of the mountains.

The First Time in a Long Time for Lunchtime

At 1:07, Mom, Meridith and I decide to have lunch, which is most unusual because while Meridith has been at work since the beginning of the new school semester, I eat at about 1:30, and Mom eats after she gets off the computer. Quick, simple, and after, I can get back to reading.

Since Bella, the woman Meridith was subbing for in the school kitchen, came back, and Meridith's home, it's back to eating together at lunch, at least this time. Otherwise, if the electricity had been on, I think Mom would have been on the computer a bit longer.

Lunch is for peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches for Mom and Meridith, a peanut butter and honey sandwich for me (My first time trying one, since I usually have peanut butter and honey on a Quaker rice cake (there is a difference. Store brands of rice cakes are never as good)), bagged movie theater-style popcorn, Andy Capp hot fries (made of corn and potato), and then for dessert, a banana for me and a banana for Mom, a Rice Krispies Treat for me, and apple slices for Meridith with honey. As simple a lunch as you can find with a power outage.

I always enjoy the company. And the cordless radio sits in a pottery bowl Meridith made in high school, still tuned to the classical music station, so it's my kind of afternoon. I'm not sure why I stopped listening to classical music, but it might have been that concert for extra credit that caused my interest to waver. It shouldn't have. Listening to classical music on the radio, you can read and do other things while it's playing. Nothing stops you. I do listen to ambient and chill music, so maybe it's an evolution for me since those kinds of music involve instrumentals as well. Perhaps it was an evolution of my interest in classical music. But rediscovering Gershwin, and developing an interest in Schubert, I think I'm going to go back to it and try again. I fondly remember listening to 93.1 in South Florida when it was a classical music station. It shouldn't be difficult to get back into it. I'm going to need a lot of music when I finally begin writing this book, so I'll explore now and see what suits me besides Gershwin and Schubert, but giving more attention to them because I haven't heard all their works yet.

This works. Not all the time, but these hours without electricity, this book, this music, this company, and the wisps of good feeling from that interview with Andrea Marcovicci, it all comes together to provide an afternoon that usually only happens on Friday, a feeling of contentment, of the universe having aligned. You might think a feeling of contentment couldn't happen here in the Santa Clarita Valley what with how many times I've railed against various facets of it, but I mean internal contentment. I have books, and music, and there was lunch with Mom and Meridith, so I'm feeling good. External contentment will come after we move, but as long as I have books and exploration of music, I can exist well here until we move, because I know that day will be coming soon.

Lunch is over and I go back to the couch to continue reading On Gratitude. Near 2:30, the power comes back on, and I'm on page 126. 235 pages are in this book, not counting the index. 109 pages to go. This book works for me.

I go on the computer to see if anything interesting has come to my inbox, if Ms. Marcovicci's assistant has replied to my e-mail of deepest thanks, and if Rebecca Wright of Movie Gazette Online has forwarded any new press releases, asking us three writers if any of the titles in those press releases interest us. Nothing new. Since I can be choosier about what I review, I wasn't disappointed. This time, I've got to really feel that I want to review something, that I can write something hopefully worthwhile. I've got ideas for my first three reviews, now including the final season of Adam-12, that I want to try, and see where they go. It's quite different from when I wrote review after review of completely independent movies and inevitably wasn't interested in a few of them but I reviewed them anyway.

With nothing else to do on the computer for now, I give it to Meridith, who hasn't had the chance to use it during the day because she's been at work. I turn on the Tivo and play one of the episodes she has of The Chew, four days' worth built up, without today's episode because it didn't record. Power outages do that.

Every Friday, with that feeling of contentment, I tell myself that I want to feel that all the time. I don't want it to be limited to Fridays. I want this feeling all the time, too, of being at peace, of enjoying myself like this, with books and classical music and all the other music I love. I'm going to lasso this feeling and have it with me all the time. A continuous atmosphere like this would lend itself to much creativity. That's what I need when I begin writing this book, and I'm going to have it. This is the type of day to have every day, interviews with singers or not.

I Don't Agree with the Academy

I told Mom today that I am done with Hollywood for a very long time after I write Mayday! Mayday!: The Making of the Airport Movies. Even though I stopped writing movie reviews in 2009, after 10 years, I was still connected to it, its history at least, through What If They Lived?, and now this. I don't mind its history so much, but rather how its history is treated nowadays. Not by the public at large, but by the industry, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

I loved visiting the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills. It is a marvelous temple devoted to movie history, and treats the books and papers of that history with the same respect afforded a church or temple, as it should, because those papers age, and great care needs to be taken to be sure they don't crumble from age and remain accessible to those who are interested in the inner workings of Hollywood.

But I don't believe that history should be limited only to researchers or students or authors or whatever the standards are by which people are deemed worthy to examine that history. I think of that recent Los Angeles Times article that says membership in the Academy is overwhelmingly white and skewed toward old (click here), and it's not so much the statistics that bother me, although it is a factor, but rather what those statistics represent: A closed-off members-only club that's hard to get into and even harder for it to bloom with good ideas. I understand membership being relegated to those who work in the industry. That's fine. Those people work hard enough as it is. But what about the outsiders? What about those who love movies, who want to know more about their favorite movies beyond the audio commentaries and documentaries on DVDs, if there even are any for some favorite movies?

I think the Margaret Herrick Library should be opened up to the public, but with a few caveats. First, visitors should be 18 years of age or older. No teens. There are important papers in that library and while reaching 18 doesn't guarantee maturity, it does set the possibility of it. Secondly, the same rules should remain, such as only pencils, paper of some kind (Legal pads, notepads, etc.), and/or laptops being permitted in the reading rooms. And drivers' licenses should be given at the desk as well in exchange for that one-day library card, given back when one is finished, just as they are now. That is a necessary level of accountability.

This may trigger some consternation among those who work there, but there should be increased supervision until this idea pans out. Not walking around like guards in a prison, but just glancing, making sure everything's calm, that papers aren't being squirreled away in pockets, nor bent, nor crumpled. I think that those who come to this library have a vested interest in movies, and would display a certain reverence toward being in that library.

I could be totally wrong. Perhaps the public is allowed to visit in some respect. But when I filled out the required form at the Special Collections desk, one of the questions was about the purpose of your research, and I had a purpose: I was doing research for my book. If there's not a sufficient purpose written, would the staff still allow access to those materials? I'm not sure, and even though I was grateful for the opportunity to be in that library and to read Charlton Heston's copy of the Airport 1975 script, and see one day's shooting schedule of The Concorde: Airport '79, I didn't feel a sense of openness. In my entry from January about my visit, I called the Library an American monastery, and that's true. There is total silence in that library and fierce concentration all around, but there isn't that sense of joy about movies, about what they bring to us. This is just work for us researchers. It's not how I felt when I got the folder containing that shooting schedule, but looking around me, it seemed so. There were probably many goals developing around me, such as writing a bestselling movie history book that could help its author dominate the movie world (Not me. I got that sense from others. I just want my books to be published, first of all, and then sell well enough so I can make some money from them, perhaps enough for some travel), but amazement about the movies seemed to be at a minimum.

Mind you, I didn't expect anyone to jump out of their chairs in excitement or start dancing like they were in a Busby Berkeley musical, but there was never that buzz in either reading room that we were looking at history that many giants had created. Here was proof that they had roamed the earth. I think if there was more of an effort to be more open to the general public, to invite them in, more excitement could be injected into that library. Keep to the same rules as necessary, but let everyone see what exists. The big excitement among the staff when I was there was the library's acquisition of director Hal Ashby's papers. Ashby had made Shampoo, Coming Home, and Being There. Why should the excitement be limited to the staff? Surely Hal Ashby fans across the country, those with travel plans, might want to see all that. 1930s movie fans would have a field day at this library too.

The Library is open Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, with the longest hours being from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, two hours longer than the other days, which also begin at 10 a.m. In a little room across from, and to the right of, the security desk, there's a set of lockers to store bags and other items that aren't allowed in the Library, including cell phones. If you need to call anyone, you either have to go outside, or you could call from that room like I did when I was checking up with Mom, Dad, and Meridith, who were at Universal CityWalk. There's not a lot of lockers because they don't expect a lot of people at the library. And they've got that down accurately. But this is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They have the history. They should be more open with it. Is it just because the general public doesn't work in the industry, but pays exorbitant prices to see a movie, that the Academy looks down on them in so many ways, that they don't believe the Great Unwashed is worthy of knowing what they know? I'm not talking corporate dealings, but just more openness. Most people love movies and if they want to know more, they should have the opportunity to find out whenever they want. It shouldn't only be limited to audio commentaries and documentaries on DVDs.

I was raised with the belief that everyone has an even chance. I live with the firm conviction that no one is above me and no one is below me. When I moved to Southern California, and got closer to Hollywood, I got the sense that it was cliquish, but it's not. It's incredibly cliquish. If you're not in the industry, you don't deserve to breathe the same air as them. Now, in light of this, it may be odd that I'm writing a book about a piece of Hollywood history that gave birth to the disaster movies that we know today, but this was also not long before a time when Hollywood was actually open to ideas, which led to some of the greatest movies ever made. They were willing to take risks in the '70s. I don't know what the politics of the industry were like during that time, but they sure were willing to give audiences what they believed they wanted, and it paid off enormously for them.

I want this book to be the last time I write about Hollywood for a very long time (despite thinking about a biography of an actor who's not one of my favorites, but who I very much admire, and a book about people in the 1930s who weren't as famous as the names we know, but who still helped Hollywood run, such as the makeup departments, research departments, commissaries, clothing departments, secretaries, etc.) because I can't give more attention to an industry that doesn't share my ideals. I hate hierarchical systems. If you come in every day and do your job well, why should office politics matter?

I figure that I'm not speaking in tandem with the reality of the times, but I believe in equality. I also believe in the saying, "You pays your money and you takes your chances." Everyone should have the same chance, but it's up to each person what they want to do with it. If someone squanders it, that's their choice.

I'm not exactly sure how much sense I make with this. I worry about being yanked into a philosophical discussion that finds me woefully unprepared to explain my ideals coherently. But I do know that I do not want to continue to write about the history of an industry that isn't open more to public perusal. They can position it any way they like, play up their strengths, play down their weaknesses. Universal is already doing that with their 100th Anniversary, conveniently forgetting that Airport single-handedly pulled the studio from the brink of bankruptcy. Or maybe the current executives have no idea. Why on earth should they study the history of their own company in order to be better informed? Undercover Boss is a prime example of this cluelessness. But if people want to know more about movies beyond the DVDs and books offered in local libraries, they should be more open to it. It could produce more profits if inclined to go that way. Possibly not a high number in comparison to the corporations that own these studios, but it would still be a worthy endeavor. Maybe it's a matter of a better-educated public being a danger to the aims of a corporation. I don't know.

I just figure that we're all on the same planet, we're all going to meet the same end one day, so what's so bad about opening up movie history more to a public that puts so much money into it as it is? Art should have no hierarchy.

My next books are going to be about, I think, more accessible histories, though one may be dicey at first. I've got some maneuvering to do on that one. I want people to know what I've learned, and not to make them jump through so many hoops to find out. I think maybe all this stems from elementary school, when I had enough of an interest in vending machines to stay after school at Riverside Elementary to page through encyclopedias to learn more, and to see if there were any other books about them (this was before the Internet came along, kids). One day was fine, two days was fine, but the third day, it was either the librarian or someone else who questioned why I was there, and said that I couldn't be there after school. First off, it's a library. Wouldn't those working in a library normally be pleased that a kid is there, curious enough about something to take books off the shelf to read? (Rhetorical question. I know the truth of it by other examples as well.) And I wasn't defacing books, and had asked my mom to pick me up a little later. That's all. Plus, I obviously couldn't go while I was in class. Knowledge shouldn't be locked up like that.

I would have liked to see more people at the Margaret Herrick Library. There should be more people there. I doubt the Academy would open part of itself up like that, but I will never stop believing that everything should be accessible to everyone. I got tired of movie reviewing not only because of the hamster-wheel feeling of the same things happening at the same times throughout the year, but because it felt like a hierarchy, of fellow film critics scrambling to try to get to the top. Of what, I really don't know. They all want to be Ebert, and they don't realize that that's not going to happen. Ebert was in the right place at the right time (upon the retirement of his predecessor at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967) and he parlayed it into what he is today.

I can't stand all that. You and I are human. We have that in common, and therefore we should have the same chances. I'm probably repeating myself, so I'll stop here. But I will say, again, that it's what I've always been and what I always will be.

I Feel Like I Can Have the Entire Universe

The day began late, a little before 1 p.m. (I work further into the early morning hours than I should, so I end up going to bed by 3:30. I have to bring myself back to a more reasonable time soon), with an important e-mail in my inbox: "How about 4 pm today?"

I've been thinking about this conversation, ever since it was suggested. It was a conversation that could either be very beneficial for my book, or could make me move on to my next book because without what this person has, I don't have a great deal to go on for my book.

Chores for those three hours beforehand: Gathering the garbages from around the house, bathrooms too, taking that and the kitchen garbage out to the bin in the garage, putting the latest recyclables into that bin; sweeping the patio and collecting the dead pine needles and putting that bag into the garbage bin, rolling the bins to the curb for pickup tomorrow, and washing the dogs' tray, water dish, and food dishes.

During all this, I'm thinking about what's to come. I need to establish that if this is to go forth, I want to be sure that I'll get my share. But do I express that a few minutes into the conversation or see where this goes before I chime in about that? I'm protective of this idea. It took me months after What If They Lived? to figure out what I wanted to write next. And the one idea I came up with before this one didn't pan out because I let the books I purchased for it sit around for weeks. Clearly I wasn't as interested in that idea as I thought I was. This is the one that makes me get out of bed every morning and get to work. Would I still have that feeling after this conversation?

4 p.m. comes and I dial the number. Time to see what can be worked out. I hope for the best, but I still need to be cautious. I've been working on this for a few months and I'd like to see it through.

You know the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Imagine that for two-and-a-half hours. That's what this conversation felt like to me. I held on to what I want for my book and heard ideas that I hadn't even considered, ideas that could strengthen what I had already thought was pretty strong by the Airport series alone. What I learned lets me go deeper into memories that didn't mean as much before I talked to this person. I merely watched some of the TV movies that were named. It was part of being an aviation enthusiast in my teens. But to give them more attention? To show how Airport didn't just give birth to the disaster movie as we know it, but also what else it caused in the same style? That could really work!

I have to be this vague right now. I'm so excited about these new possibilities that I had to write something, but there's a lot of work ahead, a lot to arrange, a lot to plan, and an outline to hammer out. If any writer tells you that writing is easy, they're lying. But it is exhilarating when you're writing what makes you glow with pure happiness, and it makes the work a little less difficult. It's still a challenge, but it can be done!

This conversation made me feel that I can have the entire universe, and that I will write the other books I want to write. It'll still be quite a while before I can begin to write one of the chapters for this book, but as long as the research is there, it'll work. This is why I exist, and it's time to show it!

Death's a Bitch, But We've Got to Keep Living

George Furth, the playwright most well known for Company, who co-starred as art critic Gerald Lucas in Airport '77, died in August 2008 at 75 years old. No family.

Producer Ross Hunter, who found Airport to be the most satisfying experience of his career, had a life partner in set decorator/producer Jacques Mapes, a relationship that lasted 40 years. Mapes was an associate producer on Airport. Hunter died in 1996, Mapes in 2002. No family from either of them, and there couldn't have been anyway, not at that time. The DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas has the Ronald Davis Oral History Collection, hundreds of interviews Professor Davis conducted with actors, directors, screenwriters, playwrights and others, of which Hunter was one and talks about Airport. The head of public services at that library is looking into it for me, and it's the only way I'll know directly about Hunter's involvement. Anything else I can find out about Hunter and Airport has to come from those still alive who were involved in the production, or biographies of those long gone, or their families, if they have any.

I've no complaints because this is the biggest puzzle I've ever had to put together, and I love it. I love figuring out the chronology of the making of each movie, and which insights will fit where.

But it's sobering. I called the phone number of Michael D. Moore, the second unit director on Airport '77. I spoke to a very old man who I couldn't understand very well. Age is catching up rapidly. Here's a man who was the second unit director on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Ghostbusters II, among such a long, long list of credits, and who knows how much longer he'll be here? I could only gather that he can't do an interview with me. He didn't sound well, and I wasn't going to press for another time. He's entitled to whatever dignity remains.

I know it happens to all of us. One day, we simply won't be here anymore. When I found out that George Furth left behind no family, it felt like I was looking into a gaping black hole that absolutely could not be illuminated. Nothing could be made clear. This was it. What Furth was is what he left behind in his plays and in his acting career. There's nothing else but that to glean from him.

But when I got off the phone after talking to Moore and trying to understand what he was saying, I was shaken. How much longer will he be here? It doesn't sound very long. What haunts me more is that the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress chooses 25 films each year to be preserved forever, yet there's nothing like that for people like Moore. The films will remain, and Raiders of the Lost Ark is in that registry, but what about Moore? Couldn't someone or some ambitious group, for the sake of history, have interviewed him about his career, learn about his part in the films he contributed to? Raiders was Spielberg and George Lucas, and also screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, and the cast, and director of photography Douglas Slocombe, and the editors and the casting people and the special effects artists and the set designers and the carpenters and so many others.

This is where it gets into murky territory, because different films are important to different people. But I mean Hollywood entirely. There should be more of an effort made not only to preserve the movies themselves, but also the history behind those movies and other movies too. There are many great historians making exactly that kind of effort, but thinking about people like Moore, it feels like it's not enough.

The Academy of TV Arts and Sciences seems to be doing this for their industry through the Archive of American Television. And maybe there is a concerted effort brewing to do the same for the movie industry that I don't know about.

I don't know. Maybe I'm overreacting. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has the Margaret Herrick Library after all, without which I would not have been able to make great progress from the start on research for Mayday! Mayday!: The Making of the Airport Movies. But on the Archive of American Television website, I'm looking at a list of professions that include designers, directors, sound professionals, stylists, on-set/location professionals, film and video post-production professionals, and many others. Movie history should be as accessible as this, especially as technology becomes more advanced. But then, those resources are reserved strictly for researchers such as myself. Not the public at large. There's also audio commentaries, but those are selective, depending on how a studio feels about a certain movie, how likely a hit it will be, and other factors.

Ironically, I can't do what I'm calling for. None of the books I want to write after this one are about movies. I was toying with the idea of a biography about a charismatic actor who's not one of my favorites, but who I admire, but I don't think I want to pursue that right after this book.

I know that most people aren't as interested as I am in this history. They go to the movies, they have favorite movies, but they don't dig into them like I do. They don't have an obsession with a movie series they've watched since they were 11 that's led them to write a book about the making of those movies.

I'll do my part, though. I'll dig through the history I can find of the Airport movies through books I've read and still have to read, interviews I've conducted and still have to do (I got a few e-mails today from people who worked on Airport and people who worked on Airport '77 who agreed to interviews), files I've looked through and still have to look through, and newspaper articles I've read and still have to read, and work my hardest to make sure these stories are known. Those who worked on these movies, who are long gone, should live on. This is my attempt at that, besides all the other reasons I've previously mentioned for writing this book.

The Soon-to-Be Second-Time Guest Blogger Watches Where He Puts His Feet

For the past two days, besides more research and preparing for a phone interview that I'll write about after it happens, I've been answering a set of interview questions and writing a guest post for G, who occasionally comments on this blog. After writing a guest post for Janie Junebug's private blog (Janie's given me permission to repost my entry on my own blog, so I'll do that once I'm done writing everything I want about Henderson, since it falls after coming back from there), I read that G was looking for guest bloggers. I went back and forth on it for a few minutes, wanting to write one, then asking myself if I really wanted to commit time to someone else's blog. Then I thought I should because how else is my blog to become more widely known, as I want it to be while I'm writing Mayday! Mayday!: The Making of the Airport Movies so potential agents and publishers can see that I've not sat back and let time pass since my first book was published. Then yes, I should. What's a few days of making sure that my writing is readable for others?

When I first wrote reviews for Film Threat, I was careful and very cautious. I wanted to make sure every thought was expressed clearly, that there weren't any sentences that sounded like they were written in a rush, that there was enough attention to grammar and punctuation that I didn't sound like I had a half-formed brain. Therefore, my early reviews expressed what I wanted to say, but they were stiff, more concerned with looking good than being lively. It's a reasonable reaction to being in a new position like that one, and as I wrote more and more reviews and months with Film Threat became years, I loosened up. I had fun with some of my reviews. I enjoyed writing interviews because most of it was a copy-and-paste job, straight Q&As except for the introduction, which was easy to write.

I spent three days writing my guest post for Janie Junebug. One day was for the writing, and the other two days were making sure I wrote well everything I wanted to say, and that every word and punctuation mark was in the right place. Reaction to my guest post on Janie's blog shows that my writing didn't read like I was nervous, but I was a bit nervous. With Film Threat, I knew who read the site: Movie buffs, independent filmmakers looking for reviews of their movies and short films, people who love independent film, people who hate independent film, and people just curious about what independent filmmakers have produced. In short, everyone who read the site was there for the reviews and the columns offered. That never changed.

With guest posts, I'm reaching different readers every time. I don't know who will be there. I hope they'll like me. But I have to make a decent impression every time because I'm there behind those words. I'm giving myself to those different sets of readers every time, telling them to see all of me right here. I'm letting it all out.

I'm not done yet with my guest post for G's blog. I haven't even gotten to the crux of it yet. Many more paragraphs to go. But even as I begin to feel for the end of my post, I keep scrolling up to the top of my Word file, reading my answers to G's interview questions. Does this read well? Have I said what I wanted to say in this answer? Can I leave this answer as it is or is there some word that has to be added to the third sentence? Letting go of these answers and this guest post is a little more difficult than letting go of this entry because this is my blog. I can put my feet up wherever I want. I do read other blogs, but I don't know the layout all that well. I have to be polite, make sure my hair is combed, and don't act like I can just put my feet up on the coffee table on top of the magazines.

It doesn't stifle my writing. Janie can attest to that. But I do admit that I put a little more effort into those guest posts because I'm in someone else's house.

You'd think I'd be nervous about the phone interview I have at 11 this morning. But I don't get starstruck. Reviewing movies since I was 15, up until I was 25, and having lived in Southern California for eight years, actors have jobs to do just like I have my job to do whenever I'm a substitute campus supervisor. We do the work and we get paid.

The interview is for Mayday! Mayday: The Making of the Airport Movies, and this actress was an extra on the fateful Trans Global flight, the interior 707 set on stage 12 at Universal. It meant five weeks of solid work for the actors chosen. You might be surprised about who it is, considering her place in television history, but that's all I'll say until the interview is done.

And G, I promise not to put my feet up where they don't belong.

My Biggest Regret in Eight Years of a Southern California Existence

In early April 2009, my family and I went to San Juan Capistrano for the day, where I would either live or retire if I loved Southern California, which will never happen. And I would have to be wealthier than I am now for that to happen. A lot.

I was so smitten with the everlasting peace of the area, a sense of history that will never fade, that I wrote an amteurish poem about my feelings. I looked up that poem today to make sure I had exact what I saw in San Juan Capistrano before I sent a message to author Kate Buford on her website about a few things dealing with Burt Lancaster that I'm seeking for my book.

Mom, Dad, Meridith and I walked around that downtown area, next to railroad tracks, passing what looked like many historical houses. Then we walked through Antique Row, which bears many antique shops, and we stopped at what looked like the largest one there.

I love antique stores. I don't collect them, but it's that deep, abiding respect for history in those stores that I feel so strongly in my own work, that'll keep me in nonfiction for years to come, continuing to explore the history of various things. At that antique store, I went into a small room off the main floor at the front of the store which held old issues of Time and Life magazines, along with other magazines that I don't remember because there weren't as many of them as those two. On a small table in front of me was a carefully wrapped set of envelopes for $12. I went back and forth on whether I wanted them, because in the upper right-hand corner, "Burt Lancaster" was stamped in blue. I e-mailed Buford because I thought that the envelopes were stamped "Burt Lancaster Productions," but he started Hecht-Lancaster, one of the first production companies run by an actor, and one of the very few to last in that time period, which then became Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, and after that ended, he started Norlan Productions (A combination of his wife's name, Norma, and his surname), but nothing in Buford's biography indicated in later years that he started a production company called "Burt Lancaster Productions." I think those envelopes indeed said "Burt Lancaster," but I wanted to make absolutely sure with Buford that that was probably the case.

I didn't buy those envelopes. And sitting on the couch today, finishing Buford's biography, I thought about those envelopes. I don't know if Burt Lancaster ever touched them or even saw them, but surely he had to have ordered them. I didn't need that kind of proof, but I think I just wanted a piece of the history of an actor who figured so largely in my teenage years by being in the first Airport movies, minor as that history might have been.

There is one thing that sort of makes up for it. At the Academy library in Beverly Hills, you're given the option of requesting photocopies of pages of documents you're poring over, whatever you need. You pay 50 cents a page, plus a mailing charge, and you receive the documents within a few weeks after your visit.

I requested that 10 pages be photocopied, and with a 75-cent mailing charge, that came out to $5.75. My visit to the library was on January 10, and I received a gray catalog envelope containing my photocopies on January 25. A few pages pertain to special effects production for Airport, especially about snow effects. But the document that made my heart flutter were call sheets for The Concorde: Airport '79, detailing the production schedule for Tuesday, January 30, 1979, the sets to be used, the actors required along with times for them to be in makeup and then on set (George Kennedy, Alain Delon, and David Warner weren't needed that day because the Concorde flight deck set wasn't being used), and call times for various crew members, including the cameraman and the camera operator, air conditioning on stage 12, and a dialogue coach. On the first page, there's a "special note" that states: "Cold weather gear for the Utah shoot will be handed out today. See Lambert Marks." That was for the crash sequence at the end of the movie. Utah stood in for Patscherkofel in Austria.

I've still got so much to do for this book that'll give me many thrills, but the biggest thrill thus far was getting the photocopies of these call sheets. All the years I watched the Airport movies, and I have part of its history. I could never imagine such a thing when I first watched these movies over and over on videotape. I noticed the effort that had gone into them with actors and special effects and all that, but not to this extent, not to pull apart each movie and see what's inside. I've kept these photocopies in their original envelope and I'm keeping it safe. I may want to use the call sheets as photos to be included in my book, but those are rights to seek much later, once I'm well into writing it.

I wish I had those envelopes, and I think it'll always remain my biggest regret of these eight years. Which goes to show that if you find something that relates to a major part of your life, grab it. Don't think about it. Just grab it.

Returning to the Love of the Work

Today I returned to my research full force. I'm nearly done with Burt Lancaster: An American Life by Kate Buford, and though I'm still questioning if I need to read all the pages of all the books I bought for research, I'm beginning to see the value in certain circumstances, such as it is with lead roles, like Lancaster's in Airport.

I decided to read the entire book not because of the research, but because I wrote an essay about the 1968 masterpiece The Swimmer for a collective Online Film Critics Society book that never happened. That was my first time doing research for anything of mine that was going to be put into print, even though it didn't happen, so being completely new to researching for a purpose way beyond getting a good grade in a history class, I overresearched. I tried to watch all of Lancaster's movies, and read all of John Cheever's works. I checked out a collection of Cheever's letters, and also watched every other film directed by Frank Perry, who directed The Swimmer. I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought this was the way to do it. I ended up framing the essay as a memory of when I first saw the movie in 2002 on Turner Classic Movies not long before I graduated high school, and how it affected me so, looking at a life so clearly squandered when I was just getting ready to figure out what I wanted to do with mine.

Having seen a lot of Lancaster's movies for that essay (which I still have and am deciding what to do with it, either find another outlet for it or post it all here), I wanted to see what Buford had written about them, because when I first checked this out from the library, I only went into the section about The Swimmer, nothing else. Ironic, considering what I had done for research, but this was only an essay.

The keyword that comes to mind a lot for Mayday! Mayday!: The Making of the Airport Movies is "context." I can't just say that Ross Hunter bought the rights to Arthur Hailey's novel, then hired George Seaton, hired the actors, hired the crew, and then they made the movie. I have to know what interested Hunter enough to turn Airport into a movie. I have to know what made him want to hire George Seaton to adapt the novel and direct it. I have to know why these particular actors were cast and if there was anyone else considered for Lancaster's role of Mel Bakersfeld, Dean Martin's role of Vernon Demerest, Jacqueline Bisset's role as Gwen Meighen, and so on. Moreso, why did Dean Martin, Burt Lancaster, Jacqueline Bisset, and all the others want to do it? To give just a little bit, I found out on my research visit to the Margaret Herrick Library that Bisset was under contract to Fox at the time and was loaned out to Universal for this. From the Q&A transcript of the screening that the Academy had in 2006 as part of its "Great to be Nominated" series, I also learned that Bisset doesn't remember much about the production. Actors' lives are indeed very busy.

In Buford's biography, I found out that the cinematographer of Airport had worked with Lancaster on two previous movies, one his directorial debut, The Kentuckian, and the other a six-week stint for Judgment at Nuremberg, though it doesn't sound like Lancaster had spearheaded that project as he did with The Kentuckian. He was fulfilling an obligation. So I wondered: Was that cinematographer suggested by Lancaster for Airport, or was that producer Ross Hunter's decision? Furthermore, Hunter wanted to have the major actors wrapped in three weeks' time, so perhaps Hunter was the one who had decided on Laszlo. Lancaster didn't sound all that involved, particularly because he didn't like the movie, calling it "the biggest piece of junk ever made." And yet, Hunter's power at Universal had severely dwindled because of costly failures like Sweet Charity that found Universal spiraling toward bankruptcy. So either he had decided on Laszlo and had to seek the approval of higher-up executives, or one of those executives thought of Laszlo, though that seems doubtful. But wouldn't you know it, Airport became the biggest hit of 1970 and saved Universal from ruin.

Then there's Whit Bissell, who worked with Lancaster on Brute Force, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and The Birdman of Alcatraz, who was in the Airport cast, yet didn't work with Lancaster. He was the passenger seated next to Helen Hayes' Ada Quonsett on the fateful Trans Global Flight 2. Was Bissell put forth by Lancaster or was this Hunter again? I'm inclined to believe this was Hunter because Buford gives barely three paragraphs over to Airport, and if Lancaster had been slightly more involved, I think Buford would have found it because this is a very thorough, meticulous, detailed biography of Lancaster.

Reading a healthy chunk of Buford's biography wasn't all I did today. I spent some time in happy disbelief of what I was doing. David Warner played flight engineer Peter O'Neill in The Concorde: Airport '79, so I contacted the L.A.-based management company that oversees him, requesting an interview, figuring also that he might be surprised to find someone not interested in talking about Titanic, as it might very well be for him when the 3D rerelease comes out in April, being that he played Billy Zane's henchman.

I also contacted The Gage Group, which handles Stefanie Zimbalist's career, to confirm that she received my phone number as was requested. I need to interview her father, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., about his role as Captain Stacy in Airport 1975, so I thought it best to contact that agency and seek her out, since her father has no contact information online.

Then came one of the biggest steps I will ever take for my book, one of the two most crucial: I contacted the publicist at Hal Leonard who oversaw the release of Trust Me, George Kennedy's memoir, requesting an extensive interview with Kennedy. I need an extensive interview since he was in all four movies and I have a lot I want to cover, especially about producer Ross Hunter and director George Seaton since they're long gone, as well as director Jack Smight of Airport 1975 (Tomorrow I'll contact the company that manages director Alec Smight, his son, but many perspectives are always interesting), and countless others. He's as important to me as Monica Lewis, who's the widow of the late Universal executive Jennings Lang, who shepherded the three Airport sequels, and I learned while skimming the pertinent parts of Lewis's memoir that Lang was thinking about a made-for-cable-TV Airport sequel, but that never panned out. I have to know if he left behind any records that indicated what that would have been about. I think that would be as much a revelation to me as it was to read the ultimately rejected Airport 1976 script at the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library. I also really really need to compliment Monica Lewis on her performances in Airport '77 and The Concorde: Airport '79. It didn't matter that her husband was the executive producer on '77 and the producer on '79. She fashioned two completely different roles, one as the caring flight attendant and the other as a well-known jazz singer going back to Moscow for a homecoming concert, acting opposite Jimmie Walker. She's been a singer since the 1940s, so she knew how to make that voice float, brief as her singing was in that one.

I've still got so many more people to contact, including Erik Estrada and Walker, who I found out has a website, so that'll make it easier. And there's the Vizcaya in Miami, which served as the exterior of the Stevens' mansion at the beginning of Airport '77, that I have to contact to see if they have any historical records of that particular shoot, and I've also got to contact the American Airlines C.R. Smith Museum in Fort Worth, Texas because I didn't get an answer from them via e-mail about whether they have historical records of Charlton Heston and Jack Lemmon training on the 747 simulators for their roles in '75 and '77, respectively. I know that both of them did it (Heston talked about it in his published journals, and Lemmon talked about it in a featurette made to promote '77 at the time of its release, the script of which I read at the Herrick Library), but I'm hoping to find more details. Oh, and Boeing too! I've got to contact them because producer William Frye went to them before '75 and '77 went into production, asking for advice and insight. They told him, before production on '75, that the mid-air transfer was crazy, but Frye, Smight, and company did it. He went back to them before '77, and they asked him, "What are you doing this time?," prefacing that by saying, "I'm not sure Boeing is always happy with me."

That I have to contact the manufacturer of the 747, my favorite plane, is a huge honor and one that still stuns me, which is probably why I haven't done it yet, also because I've got other calls to make first. I was reminded constantly today of why I want to write this book, why I'm doing all this research. It's pure love of the work, of delving more deeply into what still fascinates me after all these years. And to think that this all started from renting the first Airport on videotape (Yes, VIDEOTAPE, young ones) from a Blockbuster in Coral Springs on a rainy night when I was 11, which led to owning all four in a four-tape set with its own box to house all of them. This just makes the movies even better for me.

The Academy Library: An American Monastery and an Amazing Institution

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills is in the part that's not really Bevery Hills, not the Rodeo Drive Beverly Hills. It's more like imagining what Beverly Hills might have been without all that glamour. Impossible, but the Margaret Herrick Library is across from La Cienega Park, where you'll find joggers during the day, and soccer games and dog walkers at night. Immediately across from the library are two lanes of traffic going opposite ways, separated by a long, car-level wrought iron fence.

Open one of the two big nearly all-glass doors, and you find total silence and tile flooring. To your left, the security guard's desk where you sign in and get tokens for the lockers across the way in a small room. I had a cloth Albertsons bag with me containing three legal pads, two legal notepads, a collection of pencils in a black-and-purple zippered pouch (the two zippers on opposite sides and connected by a small strap. Pull it down and both zippers come down), a peanut butter sandwich and a bottle of Arrowhead water, a fruit and nut oatmeal from McDonalds (We ate at McDonalds in Valencia before we went to Beverly Hills, and the woman that put together the order at the counter accidentally gave us an extra oatmeal), and the hardcover edition of Scorpions: The Battle and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices by Noah Feldman (to read while waiting to be picked up later on). All of this had to go into a locker, along with my cell phone, because they don't allow cell phones in the reading rooms. I wasn't comfortable with leaving my cell phone in a locker, but at least I was able to keep my wallet. They allow that in case you need to pay for photocopying.

Behind the security guard's desk is a large framed poster for King Kong as well as a poster for either Grand Hotel or another movie I can't think of that starts with a "G". Not Gunga Din, but it was a movie from the 1930s, and it may very well have been Grand Hotel.

One security guard was going to lunch, and I chatted with him briefly, about the welcome arrival of lunchtime. Extremely nice guy. I can't understand people that turn up their noses at security guards or janitors or anyone else that they believe to be beneath their station in life. Most of the time, the security guards and janitors and others are far more interesting than the stuffy people. This guy was.

The stairs to walk up to the library are carpeted and even if you rush up the stairs, which would be quite unbecoming in this setting, there's very little sound. Just what you hear behind you from rushing up there, that brief clomp, but that's it. At the desk right when you get up there, you give your driver's license to the person at the desk, fill out a form to get a temporary library card, sign the back of the library card, and they take your driver's license and you take the library card. At this point, I didn't even notice the shelves and shelves of movie books.

Walk across the room from that desk and you reach another room, where you'll find the Special Collections desk in the middle, and to your left, the desk where you request photographic prints, and to your right, where you request scripts that they pull from the undoubtedly large back room. I called the Special Collections desk on Monday to have them pull a large number of files for me for Tuesday, including Charlton Heston's copy of the Airport 1975 script, scripts of the trailers for Airport, Airport 1975, and Airport '77, and....

I'm stopping the story for a minute because with the revelation of those titles, I will no longer be vague about what my second book is about. It's tentatively titled "Mayday! Mayday!: The Making of the Airport Movies," owing to my obsession with the four movies in my teens, when I was an aviation enthusiast, and they made me really consider a career in aviation, mostly because of George Kennedy's Joe Patroni and the passion he clearly had for aviation. I thought about it for many years, but decided last year that I'd be happiest reading and writing books.

George Kennedy is the reason I'm writing this book. His memoir, Trust Me, was published at the beginning of October, and I only found out in November that he had a memoir, and quickly ordered it, hoping he had a lot to say about the movies, being that he was in all of them.

What he wrote barely amounted to half a page, and I wasn't disappointed, because he said that he got his pilot's license while shooting the movies, Universal rented the Concorde for $40,000 an hour, and he was allowed to taxi it. The latter two details stuck in my mind. At the time, I was thinking about writing a book about the inner workings of the studios that weren't MGM in the 1930s, writing not only about the studio heads, stars, directors, and screenwriters, but also those who worked in the commissary, those who were teachers to child stars, janitors, not just what was considered the top because without those people, I don't think the studios would have been able to function. But I'm sure the hierarchies didn't allow for the top-tier to express appreciation to the lower rungs. I wanted to express that appreciation in a way, but even though I ordered a few books about the studio system, I hadn't cracked them open since I first looked at them, a few weeks having elapsed. Clearly, this wasn't the project for me.

Then about a week before the final week that led into winter break at Dad's school, I was subbing for one of the campus supervisors, and walked around a lot, thinking, thinking, thinking. I liked my aim for that 1930s Hollywood project, but I wasn't doing anything with it. I wasn't as interested in it as I was when I thought of it. I needed something else. I didn't want What If They Lived? to be my only book, and I knew I wanted to write more. I thought about what George Kennedy had said about the Concorde, about taxiing it, and an idea started to form quickly. The Concorde's rental fee belonged in a book. But also, the DVD set of the movies contained only the trailers. No featurettes. No audio commentaries. No reminiscing from significantly older actors. Bare bones. I started watching these movies on videotape. I remember buying a four-tape set of them from BJ's Wholesale Club in South Florida. I nearly wore them out. Then my parents got me the aforementioned DVD set, called the Airport Terminal Pack, for my birthday in 2005. I wanted to know more about these movies, how they were made, the technical tasks involved in filming it, what the actors themselves had gone through, who the directors were and how they wanted to film these movies, who executive producer Jennings Lang was and what made him create these sequels after Ross Hunter had produced Airport to such great success that it single-handedly pulled Universal from the brink of bankruptcy in 1970.

Mayday! Mayday! will be a straightforward history of all four movies. I'm searching for all the actors, including the ones in small roles, as well as producers, screenwriters (Eric Roth, an Oscar winner for Forrest Gump, wrote The Concorde: Airport '79 early in his career), stuntmen, prop masters, set decorators, directors of photography, composers, costumers, makeup artists, hair stylists, unit production managers, 2nd unit directors, everyone. And for those who are long gone, I'm searching for their families. Such is the case with Alec Smight, the son of the late Jack Smight, who directed Airport 1975. It wouldn't be easy to reach Alec right now because he's a director on CSI and they're back in production, now with Elisabeth Shue having replaced Marg Helgenberger. But once the show finishes production for the season (I have an idea of when that it is, based on what I know about the TV industry), I'm going to try to get in touch with him because I want to know from him his father's experiences of directing '75. (In further paragraphs, Airport will remain that, but the three sequels are '75, '77, and '79, as shorthand.)

Getting back to the Special Collections desk at the library, they had all my requested files in one box, including photocopied storyboards from '79, records from Tallmantz Aviation which used its B-25 cameraship to shoot footage for '77 and '79, a press kit detailing Universal's plans to sell a 20-piece clothing line inspired by Edith Head's costume designs for Airport, scripts for trailers and featurettes for Airport (hosted by Arthur Hailey, who wrote the novel) and '77.

I will not write about my findings in great detail because I'd like some curious readers. I'm greedy that way. But I will say that this was the pivotal day of my research, making me even more excited than I already was about this book. The scripts for the two featurettes gave me terrific new starting points on what paths to take, and even more people and companies to contact.

When you go to Special Collections, they give you a form to fill out, describing why you're there, what you're researching, what you're looking to do with it, what credentials you have, and then you sign it. I liked being able to say that I was doing research for my second book, and I wrote down the title you read. Then once you give back the form, they give you a blue sheet of paper in front of the first file or set of files you're going to pore over that details what those files are, you sign it, and then they hand over the first folder.

I went in whatever order they had put the files in the box. The Tallmantz Aviation records, which came after the Edith Head press kit, took up the most time. I opened that folder and freaked out silently. What details did I need to pull from these records? Well, I needed the tail number of the aircraft. That was a good start. I needed the number of hours flown to get a sense of filming time. I needed to know what the B25 cameraship was shooting (On Monday, August 30, 1976, they were shooting a nighttime takeoff shot for '77, to become the perspective from the private Stevens 747). At the beginning of these records, I found details of the shooting of the exterior shots for the opening credits sequence of '77.

I'm trying to remember when I took my first bathroom break, and I think it might have been after the Edith Head press kit and before these records. I didn't even know these records were coming up before I took the elevator down to the lobby, But it was a lot to go through.

Now, about photocopying, there's a horizontal grid form that you fill out, writing under the labels of the boxes the file name, the file number, the name of the file (For example, Airport - Featurette, even though I didn't request anything from that), a description of the file (One line, very short), and how many pages it is.

At the end of the Tallmantz records, my heart nearly stopped. I found a call sheet for '79 from January 30, 1979 (The movie was released on August 17) detailing what actors were required on the Concorde cabin set, what time they were expected (8:45 a.m. for the majority of them), as well as what scenes would be filmed in the future. There was also an announcement on the page about cold weather gear being handed out for the shoot in Utah (If you've seen the movie, remember the Concorde landing in the snow and being buried under it? Utah, standing in for Patscherkofel in Austria). Even though I could have probably gotten another photocopying form if I asked, I'm lucky I didn't accidentally rip the first one in excitement while writing down the details for the call sheet. As I do further research for this book, and eventually writing it, I'm keeping that call sheet in front of me. From videotape to DVD to seeing all these papers at the library. I'm sitting here a little over a day after and I'm still amazed that I did all this.

But that wasn't the only thing that stunned me. After finishing with the Tallmantz Aviation records, the next file handed to me was thick, with "Charlton Heston papers" written on the tab. I opened it up, and it was Charlton Heston's copy of the '75 script, exactly what I had been anticipating. He used this script. He thumbed through it. He crossed out lines that weren't being used and replaced them with what he was told were the new lines. There were two huge coffee stains on pages 13 and 14, the one on 13 nearly dominating it. Through it, I confirmed the start date of filming on '75, and I also wrote down some of the lines that were crossed out. There is no fanfare in research, no Glory, Glory Hallelujah raining down from hidden speakers. Charlton Heston is long gone, and this is part of what remains of his legacy. The bent pages of his script. His handwriting. The coffee stains. I'll never know at what point he accidentally spilled coffee or when those new lines were given to him, and I don't expect to know. The book is partly about him, and it's also partly about Karen Black, and Dean Martin, and Jack Lemmon, and Christopher Lee, and Darren McGavin, and Monica Lewis, and George Kennedy, and Lee Grant, and Helen Reddy, and Linda Blair, and Jacqueline Bisset, and producers Ross Hunter and Jennings Lang, and directors George Seaton, Jack Smight, Jerry Jameson, and David Lowell Rich, and directors of photography Ernest Laszlo and Philip Lathrop (Lathrop shot the three sequels), and composers Elmer Bernstein, John Cacavas ('75 and '77), and Lalo Schifrin, and screenwriters George Seaton, Don Ingalls, Michael Scheff & David Spector, and Eric Roth, and so many others you wouldn't know right now if I told you, but I hope you will know them through what I intend to write.

It was just me and Heston's script, and the woman sitting across from me tapping out notes on her laptop was involved in whatever her research entailed and it was the same with the two people at the table next to me (Including a woman with very nice legs wearing a slightly above-the-knee skirt, and it was very hard not to take a quick peek when I was waiting behind her at the Special Collections desk to get my next folder). This is what research is. It's the love of movies, of wanting to know what happened in their history. One researcher in the room was working on something about Hitchcock, another was researching Cedric Gibbons, the famous MGM art director. You can't shout to the world your find, not only because the library knew about it before you did, but because you'd be making a ruckus that would probably get you kicked out, and there's more research to be done. How else can a book be written?

After giving back Heston's '75 script, I got the next related folder, which showed that he had a good sense of humor. He clipped the cover of a July 1975 issue of Mad Magazine, which turned '75 into "Airplot '75." Nancy, the flight attendant (Karen Black), became Naggy, Heston's Alan Murdock became Mudrock; Sister Beatrice was Sister Beardless; Helen Reddy's Sister Ruth was Sister Cooth; Gloria Swanson was Swansong; Mrs. Patroni was Mrs. Baloney; Linda Blair's Janis was Janecch; Glenn Purcell was Purehell; and Erik Estrada's Julio was Jigolo.

I wrote down in my notes my two favorite exchanges from the section that Heston had also clipped:

Naggy says to Mudrock, "Engine three is acting badly." Mudrock replies, "So?!? Why should engine three be different from anyone else in this movie?!?"

Salt Lake Control says, "Okay, Columbia 904! Hey, Captain, can I ask a question? If we're all in a Universal picture, how come you're a Columbia airliner?" The captain replies, "It's our sneaky way of putting the blame for this bomb on someone else."

The cover of the issue was pure genius. All the major actors in the movie are asleep on one side of the plane, and it looks like Henry Kissinger is in the back row, also asleep. Alfred E. Newman is sitting next to a sleeping Gloria Swanson, very much awake, holding an inflated air sickness bag in one hand, about to pop it with his fist.

Also in Heston's folder was a Spanish lobby card for '75. I'm curious to know where he got that or if it was sent to him, but that'll never be known.

After the Heston papers came set decorator Jack Moore's bound faux leather copy of the Airport script. Airport was his final movie, and this was the first time I saw a script for Airport, important to me because so far I can't find very much about George Seaton and I wanted some insight into him, through his writing.

Moore underlined all the locations of the scenes, needing to know them to get started on thinking of how to decorate the sets, based on what producer Ross Hunter and writer/director George Seaton wanted, and likely contributing his own ideas. For example, Moore's mind is already at work when Bakersfeld is paged for the white phone outside a section of a building at the airport. Moore circled the words "white phone" in the paging line and in the wide margin, wrote "White phone black one?" (No question mark after "phone." Getting the work done matters most.)

By this time, it was a little past 3 p.m., I had gotten to the library a little after 11 a.m., and had my bathroom break at 1 p.m. I was getting sluggish, a little frustrated (Not by the research, but it's that feeling when you've been sitting for hours, staring and concentrating), and I needed a longer break. Before I had signed for the Jack Moore script, I remembered the transcript from the Academy's 2006 screening of Airport as part of its "Great to be Nominated" series, which featured Jacqueline Bisset, Burt Lancaster's widow Susie, and a few other actors from the movie, and that it was one of the reasons I was at the library. I requested it from the woman at the counter at the time, and as I was nearing the end of Heston's script, she came over to me with the request form, making sure she got it right on there (I had her change "1976" to "2006"), and then she went in the back to get it. When I went up to the counter to hand over Jack Moore's script (You can't leave research materials on the table when you're leaving for a break) and have them keep it near my box for me, I saw that the transcript was waiting on the cart. That would come after my break, after I was done with the Jack Moore script.

I took the elevator down to the lobby, saw the security guard at the counter that I talked to briefly when I came in, asked for a locker token, went to my locker and pulled out my bag, putting it on a small table that was filled with ads for the Aero Theatre, which shows classic movies, and pulling out the paper bag with my peanut butter sandwich, bottled water, as well as the McDonald's bag that had the oatmeal in it.

I put the bag back in the locker, put the coin in the slot, closed the locker, turned the key and pulled it out, and heard the coin drop to wherever the coin drops to. Maybe to the bottom in some kind of compartment, maybe to the floor where it's swept out from under there. Most likely an unseen compartment, I think.

I went outside, but the only bench in front of the library was taken, so I sat on a curb in front of a bush and ate. Relief. I felt a lot better. Sandwich gone, oatmeal nearly gone, water three-quarters gone. I watched the security guard run to the FedEx truck parked outside to give a package to the driver.

I went back inside, got another token, put the key in the locker, opened it, and put the paper bag with only my water bottle and the McDonald's bag with the rest of my oatmeal inside the locker, in front of my cloth bag. Put the coin in the slot, closed the locker door, took out the key, coin drop.

I didn't feel like going back upstairs yet, so I went to talk to the security guard for a little while. I told him that I noticed him running to the FedEx truck and he said that while he was at lunch, the security guard manning the desk for him forgot to give a package to the previous FedEx driver that had come by and he didn't want to miss it this time. He told me that he and others call that particular FedEx driver Bitterman because he's bitter about everything. He complains about his job, he complained that there were so many packages at Christmas. The security guard laughed when he got to that part of the story and said to me, "What did he expect?" He then told me that he lives an attitude of gratitude and didn't see what the driver had to complain about. The driver a job, good benefits, good pay, yet he said to him that he's lucky because he gets to sit in air conditioning all day.

As we were talking, a few employees came by to pick up a few of the packages stacked against the wall, making a bit of small talk with the security guard, and then they left. I liked this guy. He was clearly appreciative of what he had, seemed to enjoy his life, and was good-natured. That's everything I like in anyone.

I asked him when his shift was over and he said at 6. I told him I'd be down later before he left for the night and headed back upstairs, back to Jack Moore's copy of the Airport script.

I liked that Seaton's script didn't have overly long character descriptions and motivations and descriptions of various actions, how an actor is supposed to react. He clearly had respect for actors because he gave them just enough of what they should know about a character, presenting it more as guidelines than edicts. That's the impression I got anyway. He seemed to trust the actor to figure out how to play a scene after reading what he described.

The transcript came next and the hits just kept on coming. I filled a few pages with notes, learning a great deal about the 707 cabin and flight deck sets on stage 12 at Universal, exactly what I had hoped to find when I started this project. After that came another script I was anticipating: The first draft of Airport 1976 by H.A.L. Craig, delivered in March 1974, two months before '75 began shooting. Jennings Lang must have been hoping to have another sequel to shoot right after '75 was finished, but this wasn't the one.

The action returned to Lincoln International from Airport, where George Kennedy's Joe Patroni was now the manager after Burt Lancaster's Mel Bakersfeld became head of the FAA. After I read that Patroni was now the manager, I wanted to see how he did in the position. The main plot involved the hijacking of the private 747 of one of the richest men in the world, which is likely why Craig got a "story by" credit for '77. Helen Hayes' Ada Quonsett was in this one too, but admittedly, the new characters were awful, nothing remotely interesting about any of them. It was a 180-page script, and counting each page of at least one minute of screen time, a little unwieldy in light of there being so much clunkiness about, but then Craig may have been operating under executive producer Jennings Lang's idea of having enough written in case this was the script so that an extra hour could be filmed for television broadcast. You see, '75, '77 and '79 each had an extra hour or so of footage filmed in the way of extended scenes or entirely new scenes, all during the same production. Lang sold these versions to networks, which made entire evenings out of them. NBC aired '75 as its "Saturday Night at the Movies" in 1978. In the '90s, TNT took the sequels and aired them as part of a "Super '70s Week." Scenes from '79 that were filmed for that purpose can be found on YouTube, and there's a bit from '77 there too, but that's it. One of the personal mysteries I want to solve is what all the footage is from each sequel. I know nearly nothing of what was filmed for '75's eventual television broadcasts. I know a bit about '77 from what I saw on YouTube (I may have seen all those extra scenes when TNT aired it, but I've long forgotten), and I remember only the alternate Kevin Harrison suicide scene in front of the media in '79 from that TNT broadcast.

I was relieved that Lang decided not to produce Airport 1976. It could have been that he didn't want to bring the movies back to Lincoln International. Maybe he didn't want to go where another producer had been. He wanted to create his own movies. But it's clear that the hijacked 747 angle stuck in his mind, though something different to incapacitate the passengers then some kind of pellets being dropped into the air conditioning system on the plane to apparently knock out the passengers. I get the impression that Lang wanted more detail. And considering that he had gotten the cooperation of the U.S. Air Force for '75, well, why not go bigger? He wouldn't have gotten that with the '76 script. The opening credits for '77 say "Story by H.A.L. Craig and Charles Kuenstle." Now I have to find out who Kunestle is and if he contributed a script too.

After this came correspondence between special effects artist Linwood G. Dunn and various high-ranking members of the Airport production team. Not a whole lot to write down. It took some time to get through Dunn's special effects papers, just skimming mostly since special effects are part of what makes a movie, not the whole thing, so I wasn't going to go that detailed about the special effects, just enough to be well-informed so it reads well in my book.

With the Linwood G. Dunn papers done, I was finished with my box. I had gone through everything and I thought I might not have, considering the folders that kept coming out of there. I got my library card back and went to the right to the scripts desk and requested Airport, '75, '77, '79 and Poseidon from 2006, in the hope that it was a draft that touched upon what I thought the movie should have been, what would have made it a smarter disaster movie.

While the scripts were being retrieved, I took the elevator to the lobby to see the security guard before he left. I thanked him for his kindness and asked for his name for the acknowledgements page. He said I didn't have to do that, but I told him that he did a lot for me (It's especially nice to see someone who's actually living an attitude of gratitude) and wanted to. I also wrote down my name and What If They Lived? so he could look it up on Amazon. And that was it. I thanked him again profusely, we shook hands, and I went back upstairs to the scripts that were waiting for me.

I started with Airport, which was bound in a tan cover with the title printed in black on the spine and was gifted to the library by director of photography Ernest Laszlo. It was the same script I had read as Jack Moore's, but without all the writings. I forgot to mention before that Moore's folder also included long sheets of legal paper with many lists of locations and tasks. I looked at those, but couldn't find much of anything to use.

'75 was the same way. It was the final shooting script dated April 26, 1974, exactly what Heston had, just without lines crossed out, new lines written in, and huge coffee stains. There was nothing in it that I hadn't already seen.

The script for '77 was a "second revised final draft screenplay" dated August 4, 1976. This was one I needed, and I took lots of notes, mostly asking myself if certain scenes had been filmed for TV broadcast and if other ones had been extended scenes that were filmed for broadcast. I intend to find out about all this.

I then went into the '79 script by Eric Roth, which had the alternate titles of Airport '79: The Concorde (Instead of The Concorde: Airport '79), and Airport '79: Supersonic. I like the last one, but Lang was smart, considering that the plane cost Universal $40,000 an hour. For that price, the plane had better be in the title. There was also a page detailing character name changes, such as David Harrison now being Kevin Harrison and Celeste now being Isabelle, Sylvia Kristel's character, and Coach Spassky now being Coach Markov, who was played by Avery Schreiber. I hope to find out from Roth how he was hired for this, how long it took him to write the first draft, and what research he did for it. For example, was it Roth's idea to give Markov a deaf daughter or a suggestion by Lang expanded?

And that was it. My Airport research was over. I filled all but 19 pages of one legal pad, using only the first page of a legal notepad to copy down the names of two people in Special Collections to help me, as well as the name of the security guard so I can put them in my acknowledgements page. I also used only one pencil throughout the entire 8 hours, a Crayola twist pencil. But better to be overprepared for this.

Now it was time for the Poseidon screenplay. I returned '77 and '79 to the scripts desk (I returned Airport and '75 to the desk after I was finished in order to get '77 and '79) and took Poseidon from the person behind the desk.

This was a "Final white draft" dated June 17, 2005, and future revisions were listed with the color pages they would be. A further revision came on June 27, 2005 and was in blue, July 5 in pink, July 25 in yellow, August 11 in green, and September 12 in gold. The page also listed previous revisions that had been done by 10 other screenwriters, with the current script by Mark Protosevich and current revision by Akiva Goldsman. The movie that was barely seen in theaters was exactly that way in the script, but the only consolation was that some of it read better on the page. Maybe because there's more hope on the page before it becomes a movie. After 10 writers taking a crack at it, director Wolfgang Petersen couldn't very well do much else.

I returned Poseidon, got my library card back, turned the photocopying sheet in to the Special Collections desk, paid $5.75 for 10 pages and told the guy at the counter that they should be mailed to me since this was the only time I would be at the library (The only day when the library's open until 8 p.m. and I needed that time cushion, and the only day it was possible after the holidays were over, and Dad's going back to work next week). I asked the guy if I could look around the library and he said yes, and I made sure I got the spelling of his last name correct for my acknowledgements page, collected everything of mine at my table, made sure I had everything, then went to look at the books.

This is paradise for any movie buff. Any book you can imagine about an actor, about a certain genre, about movies from another country (They've got many books on Mexican cinema, for example), about the making of certain movies, about anything you could want to know, they have it. I went into each tight space in awe to look at the shelves around me, to note the books I've read and the books I have here at home. After circling the entire library, I went to the desk near the stairs and asked the woman there if the library would consider stocking my book, and was told I'd have to talk to the person in charge of book acquisitions. I will.

She then took my legal pads and notepads and flipped through them to make sure I wasn't smuggling anything out of the library, saw that everything was clean, and I handed over my library card and got my driver's license back, then went down the stairs. I went to my locker, got out my cloth bag, stuffed the paper bag with my bottled water and the McDonald's bag into the cloth bag, put the pencils and technical eraser into the black-and-purple zippered pouch and zipped it back up, made sure I had everything and left that little room. I said good night to the new security guard on duty, went outside to the bench near the driveway where Mom, Dad and Meridith had dropped me off, and sat down to wait for them to come from Universal CityWalk, where they had been all day, and had gotten me a magnet that said "Turn off the TV and read a book. Think outside the box," and a laminated card that said "Bowler's License," with the stats and photo being that of The Dude from The Big Lebowski. I spoke to them before I put my cell phone in the locker and outside before I ate.

From that bench, I watched a soccer game going on at the park, joggers, a guy walking his dog, and enjoyed that peace. My research ultimately doesn't matter on this planet. I don't mean it in a low self-esteem kind of way. I'm fine and well-adjusted on that end. I just mean that there I was on that bench, the traffic was passing by, and only my parents and Meridith knew that I had been reading Charlton Heston's copy of the '75 script, learning more than I had ever expected to find about the Airport series, being introduced to new paths to take with my book, getting even more excited about the great possibilities ahead for what I'm doing with this book. The world keeps going on. It doesn't stop for every parade. And I like it that way. My research at the Margaret Herrick Library ended quietly, and I like quiet. I'd rather it be this way, enough quiet to do what I want. I don't need hype. I believe it's overused for many things. If you believe your work is worth something, can be beneficial to some audience, then just do the work. Have something tangible to present to the world. Don't be like those people who audition on American Idol saying that they're the best that anyone will ever know and then they begin to sing and you wish they had decided to go to work that day or do anything else but sing.

All I will say here at the end of this entry is that this research day has pushed me into being serious about this project. I was in a preliminary stage before this, buying books I needed of actors who were in these movies, buying making-of books like one about The Wizard of Oz and another about Blade Runner for guidance and inspiration, and I knew that I wanted to do this, but to what extent? Now I know. I'm going all the way on this. Finding a publisher, writing book proposals, and pitching this book to publishers and agents is all on me now. Only me. I will do it. I want people to read my book when the time comes. When I'm finished writing it, or at least the first two chapters since a lot of publishers seem to prefer that when considering manuscripts, the first draft will be for me. The second, third, fourth and whatever drafts will gradually be for potential readers. I will do my best to make this project what I want it to be, what I hope to gain from it, namely, in a way, getting the audio commentaries I never got from the DVD set. I will only be satisfied once I know as much as possible about the Airport movies, which I prefer to be everything there is to know, but we'll see how this plays out. I'm very happy to be doing this. Most importantly, I'm having so much fun doing it.

(Yet another thing I forgot to mention: The Special Collections area with the tables reserved only for Special Collections researchers is called the Katharine Hepburn Reading Room and has a blown-up photo of Hepburn in one corner of the room. Also in this room, behind glass and under glass was an exhibit about the public reception Hitchcock's Psycho received, with articles and letters and photos. The many bookcases and long tables across from the Katharine Hepburn Reading Room is the Cecil B. DeMille Reading Room.)

Thank Goodness for Julie Hyzy

Before I get to what this is all about, I just discovered that my workload on Tuesday at the Margaret Herrick Library has increased considerably, though I'm not complaining because there could be even more treasure to unearth.

I searched the library catalog again for the scripts of the movies I'm writing about, to check the date on one of them, and left the search terms at "keyword," rather than "exact beginning of title." I found the listing of that particular script, but further down that page, I saw the listing of the papers of a man who was an art director on one of the sequels, and then the production designer of the following sequel. According to the listing, there's "eight production design drawings," (and I've got to see if any of them are related to my movies), as well as an album assembled by this man and his wife of their careers in Hollywood.

Below that listing was one for the papers of a man who was a set decorator on the first movie I'm writing about, which turns out to have been his last movie. His papers include the script of that first movie and I want to see if there's any notations by him on it, perhaps any insight into his thinking during production, maybe even communication with the writer/director of the film, of whom I can't find much, at least not yet, so I'm relying on other sources to hopefully give me something about him.

Each listing says that these papers are "Available by appointment only," so I'm going to call the library later today and make an appointment. I'll be at the library for hours anyway, more than I thought now with these papers potentially available to me.

Ahead of this important research visit (I'm still stunned that I'm allowed to do this), I began reading the novel that the first movie is based on. I started yesterday afternoon, but by page 136, I'd had it. I know I have to keep reading to get a good grasp on this since I haven't read it in many years, and I respect the author because his insights into various institutions are generally unmatched, but he dumps all his research into his novels, and character descriptions go far beyond what's necessary in the service of the story. There were instances where 20-30 pages passed before getting back to other characters, most of those pages taken up by explanations. The author doesn't think his readers are morons, far from it. He wants them to know what he knows, what they might not know and might be interested in. But there are so many times in this novel that I want him to get on with it already.

I couldn't take this cement block of a novel anymore and went looking for something else to read. I needed a break from the world of my second book, and in one stack near my bed, I found State of the Onion by Julie Hyzy, billed on the paperback cover as "First in the new White House Chef Mystery series." I've been looking for a series I could get into, because I want characters I can go back to often, for as long as an author writes them. I'm trying the Nero Wolfe series again because though I was bored by the mysteries themselves, I liked Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. I liked Wolfe's schedule of life, and I liked the rapport he and Archie have. I have the first two novels in a stack somewhere in my room, but I know where they are when I'm ready.

I also want a series of some kind that I can relate to. I still have the latter two novels of Ridley Pearson's Kingdom Keepers series to read, and that may become automatic because it revolves around the Disney empire. With State of the Onion, I would have a fictional White House to read about (For me, fictional presidencies count, as The West Wing is my favorite show of all time), and maybe whatever mystery is involved would be more interesting because it would be happening in the White House.

Thank goodness for Julie Hyzy! She cured me of nearly-punishing boredom and gave me much happiness in reading about this White House. Hyzy has clearly done a lot of research, and she threads it throughout her story; she doesn't dump all of it in one place. I like novelists who remember that they're writing a novel. Olivia "Ollie" Paras, the White House Assistant Chef, is most enjoyable to know. At the beginning, she carries no baggage and is not a detective in any way. She gets caught in the middle of a major security breach on the grounds of the White House and begins to think that something's not quite right about it after footage on the news is different from what she saw. She digs from there.

Hyzy also fully draws the rest of the kitchen staff, including retiring White House Executive Chef Henry Cooley, and even those characters who are assholes as soon as they walk in, namely Peter Everett Sargent III, head of the White House's Etiquette Affairs department (He prefers "Sensitivity Director"), are fun to hiss at and hope for a swift-enough demise. Hyzy does that very well because you can't be angry at them for too long. There's so much else going on. Hyzy also makes the fictional names of Middle Eastern countries seem plausible. It's not like Hollywood Novelist Syndrome where the names of big stars in that universe seem so far-fetched, even though it's all fiction.

It's rare lately that I read a 301-page novel in one sitting, but this was that novel. And I've already ordered the second novel in Hyzy's series. It makes going back to the novel for my research easier to bear. I've got strength again because of Hyzy.